This text belongs to 'Penínsulas', the newsletter that Enric Juliana sends to the readers of 'La Vanguardia' every Tuesday. If you want to receive it, sign up here.
The European agrarian protest arrives this week in Spain. The wave comes from the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, France and other countries and is condensed now, four months before the elections to the European Parliament. We explained it this weekend in La Vanguardia. Before the main Spanish agricultural organizations made known their protest platform and called a large day of protest for Friday, February 21 in Madrid, last week 'spontaneous' calls began to circulate via electronic messaging inviting farmers and ranchers to mobilize outside the majority associations.
A manifesto signed by an entity called the National Association of Farmers and Ranchers of the Primary Sector that makes a unique mix of agrarian and political demands has attracted attention. I was interested in that document. I'll talk about him later. We have seen the appearance of new entities in moments of strong tension in recent episodes. It already happened during the demonstrations of the so-called National November in front of the PSOE headquarters on Ferraz Street in Madrid. Something similar can happen during Agrarian February. Under the lettuce there is tomato.
It is possible that we will soon see truck driver Manolín Hernández appear at the head of that platform of transporters (Plataforma en Defensa del Transporte) that tried to trigger a general strike in March 2022, shortly before the elections in Castilla y León. Vox, which currently controls the Ministries of Agriculture of Castilla y León, the Valencian Community and Aragon, and shares that of Extremadura, has acquired skill in creating satellites. The Popular Party, which possibly regrets at this moment having offered such advice to its competitors on the extreme right, has called its Agriculture advisors today to a meeting in Genoa to coordinate strategies.
There are struggles within the Spanish right to channel a wave of protest in Spain that is making the main European leaders nervous, given the proximity of the European elections. I think it would be a mistake to identify the unrest of rural people with a single political ideology, since this unrest has diverse reasons and also different expressions. The publication Canal Red, directed by Pablo Iglesias, offered an “anti-capitalist” interpretation of the current agrarian protests in Europe. Farmers and ranchers are not by definition extreme right-wing people, but we will agree that the conventional right and the extreme right are competing today to ride the quad horse of agrarian protest when there are only four months left until decisive European elections.
Under the lettuce there is tomato and among the thirteen points of the manifesto cited above there are two political demands that attract attention: the call for a referendum to prohibit public subsidies for political parties and the implementation of a new electoral law in Spain , also via referendum, with a majority vote system based on single-member constituencies of 100,000 voters, British style. One seat per school and the one who comes first in the majority of the schools governs with an absolute majority.
Under the lettuce there is tomato. The political scientists who have advised the almost unknown National Association of Primary Sector Farmers and Ranchers want a system of parties especially financed by banks and large companies, since it is a joke to think that currently a political organization can compete with the sole contribution from its members. The Gürtel case is quite illustrative in this regard. The reduction of public funds to parties has been carried out in Italy, thanks to the demagoguery of the 5 Star Movement, and its result has been an exponential growth of the parties' dependence on contributions from large companies and corporations. This Sunday, the newspaper La Repubblica reported that Lega Nord is receiving a flood of donations from public works and transport companies since its leader, Matteo Salvini, heads the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport. This is the model proposed by the agrarian platform that perfumes its demands with aromas of 'political radicality'.
The electoral law proposed by the agrarian manifesto is, in general terms, the model defended by Manuel Fraga Iribarne during the late Franco era. A majority system similar to the British one, which would have given an absolute majority to post-Franco conservatism, guaranteeing a slow and highly controlled transition from above.
In the current political circumstances, the division of the country into single-member constituencies of 100,000 voters would provoke a phenomenal exercise in gerrymandering, a true pitched battle to define the boundaries of the new electoral districts for the benefit of one political formation or another. [Gerrymandering is a colloquial political science term that refers to the modification of constituencies to benefit a party. The word has its origins in the skills of the American politician Elbridge Gerry, governor of Massachusetts, to modify a key electoral district for his reelection in 1812. The newspapers noticed that the new district took the shape of a salamander (salamander) and from there arose the word gerrymander].
An electoral law of such characteristics would probably cause the formation of large coalitions to compete for seats with a single representative, with a clear advantage for the right. Inland Spain would become the impregnable bastion of the right against a coastal Spain with greater plurality. Today, coastal or peripheral Spain conditions the formation of majorities. With the new model, internal Spain would be the guarantor of a strong conservative hegemony. It seems that there are agrarian forces that dream of being able to dominate Spain. In neighboring Italy, the Coldiretti farmers association, of Christian Democrat origin, has become over time one of the main lobbies in the country. Coldiretti has vetoed the implementation of the minimum wage and is currently obtaining significant concessions from the Government of Giorgia Meloni after having put the tractors on the road.
The implementation of this electoral model in Spain would be unconstitutional. Article 68 of the Constitution says the following: “Congress is made up of a minimum of 300 and a maximum of 400 deputies, elected by universal, free, equal, direct and secret suffrage, in the terms established by law. The constituency is the province". Spain is one of the few European countries whose Constitution protects the continuity of the electoral system. It was an initiative of Adolfo Suárez during the transition, who considered it essential to maintain the province as the basis of the political system. The electoral law released in the first elections in 1977 was clearly favorable to UCD, thanks to the premium for seats in the less populated provinces, but it did not suffocate the opposition. It was more permeable and proportional than the majority system defended by Manuel Fraga.
That law, which has remained unchanged since 1977, clearly benefited the Popular Party in the last general elections. Let's see it. With only 339,000 more votes than the second most voted party, the Popular Party took 16 deputies ahead of the PSOE on July 23, at a rate of about 21,200 votes per deputy. Under the current law, obtaining a deputy for the provinces of Madrid or Barcelona, the most populated in Spain, costs a minimum of 90,000 votes. The conclusion is clear: the PP managed to expand its advantage thanks to the less populated provinces, concentrated in inland Spain, in which obtaining a deputy costs many fewer votes.
The Suárez law benefits the right, as long as it does not go to the elections very fragmented. This is what happened in the two calls of 2019 (April and November) in which that political space was disputed by the Popular Party, Ciudadanos and Vox. The triple competition of the right made it possible for the PSOE to be the party with the most votes in many provinces and for Unidas Podemos to secure third position in many of them, exceeding 35 seats. In the July 2023 elections, the competition on the right had already been simplified with the virtual disappearance of Ciudadanos. The PP-Vox duet aspired to the absolute majority, without achieving it. At this time, the PP is radicalizing its discourse to reduce Vox's space in the elections in Galicia and in all the elections that come after to a minimum. The PP wants to once again be the force that concentrates all the votes of the right and of a clearly diminishing center. And Vox wants to take oxygen again with the agrarian protest.
Someone is currently dreaming of an agrarian 15-M that calls into question the political system in Spain. Now that I remember the camping of the 15-M movement in Puerta del Sol, the proposal for a new electoral law also came out. In 2011, the 'indignants' proposed a Spain with a single constituency to reinforce the proportional election of deputies.
“The Government will regulate the first elections to the Cortes to constitute a Congress of 350 deputies and elect 207 senators at a rate of four per province and one more for each island province, two for Ceuta and two for Melilla. The Senators will be elected by universal, direct and secret suffrage, of the Spaniards of legal age who reside in the respective territory.
The elections to Congress will be inspired by criteria of proportional representation, in accordance with the following bases:
This is the text of the first transitional provision of the Political Reform Law approved in a referendum on November 9, 1976. In this text appears the basic mechanism for Spain's transition from a dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy. Anyone who wants to understand the evolution of Spanish politics in the last 48 years should memorize that text. The province and the proportionality of the electoral law (proportionality corrected by the allocation of seats to the provinces) are the keys to the transition devised by the jurist Torcuato Fernández Miranda, former secretary general of the Movement and last president of the Francoist Cortes. The Asturian Fernández Miranda wrote the script and the Avila native Adolfo Suárez, former Secretary General of the Movement and former Director General of Television and Radio Broadcasting, executed it with great panache, determination and a telegenic smile.
Why this obsession with the province? The province was the base of political power during the dictatorship. The civil governors, in turn provincial heads of the Movement, directed the public order forces and had the mayors under their control. The presidents of the provincial councils controlled the money tap. A transition process based on the construction of a reformist electoral platform from within the regime, recruiting and prioritizing the most open-minded personnel, could only be done from the civil governments and the provincial councils. The province was essential to carry out a controlled and relatively rapid transition.
UCD won the first general election with 165 seats. He lacked eleven deputies to ensure full control of the new Congress. He did not obtain an absolute majority because the provinces of Barcelona, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa failed him. In Barcelona, Suárez's party only won 5 of the 33 deputies in the running. In Vizcaya, two out of ten, and in Guipúzcoa, none of the seven that had to be chosen. At the time of writing the Constitution, Suárez wanted the provincial-based electoral law to be protected by the Magna Carta.
Almost half a century later, on July 23, 2023, the PP only obtained 5 of the 32 deputies in the race in the province of Barcelona. Perhaps for this reason, an unknown agrarian battalion now dreams of a majority electoral law that does not fit with the Constitution. There is tomato under the lettuce.
